Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments -- over 5 million questions -- to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

Do LLMs have Consistent Values?

Values are a basic driving force underlying human behavior. Large Language Models (LLM) technology is constantly improving towards human-like dialogue. However, little research has been done to study the values exhibited in text generated by LLMs. Here we study this question by turning to the rich literature on value structure in psychology. We ask whether LLMs exhibit the same value structure that has been demonstrated in humans, including the ranking of values, and correlation between values. We show that the results of this analysis strongly depend on how the LLM is prompted, and that under a particular prompting strategy (referred to as 'Value Anchoring') the agreement with human data is quite compelling. Our results serve both to improve our understanding of values in LLMs, as well as introduce novel methods for assessing consistency in LLM responses.